My nice-but-cumbersome lapdog decided some time ago that being asked to suspend is insulting or something, and now goes catatonic instead: the suspend works fine, but absolutelly nothing, ever, wakes it up again.

"Roses are red and my SO-DIMMs still hot,
you asked me to sleep but I'll let you rot."

A lot of debugging (and swearing) later, I now know that the culprit (at least for kernel 2.6.35.14) is the module lpc_sch, which isn't needed for normal operations anyway. blam! Bye-bye, module.

Wikipedia is lovely. Today I learned that Kurt Gödel (a pretty well-known mathematical genius) also was a paranoiac and starved to death while his wife was hospitalized because he refused to eat anything not prepared by her.

For some reason I simply love to RTFM, if the M(anual) really is F(ine). This collection of locomotive manuals is an especially lovely trove of interesting (but essentially useless, to me) information.

For example, the service manual for 7FDL diesels lists all kinds of things that you need a pry bar for on this engine, like speeding up the engine (beyond the governor's limits).

Even cooler, though, are two-stroke diesels. Have a look at this clip of an EMD 645 starting up. A cold start and with the exhaust manifold disconnected, to me this thing sounds very much like a cat purring once warmed up. According to the manual that would be a 2300+ hp, 13 ton cat... Plus, an engine where you need a hoist to lift a single piston must be good.

Should reincarnation really be an option, then I'd like to deposit that I want to come back as a diesel engineer next time round :-)

Conny completed her pre-learners rider training in Kingscliff this weekend and in a few days she'll be old enough to take her theoretical exam (=16 years and 9 months). After that she can ride the Ninja by herself (in NSW) or with somebody with an open licence accompanying her (in QLD).

That's the bike she is sharing with her mum (for now, I suppose), a 2011 Kawasaki Ninja 250.

I thoroughly detest udev: large, ugly, inflexible, disgusting, recently started to insist on DEVTMPFS and /usr being on / (or having an initramdisk, neither of which I accept) and so on.

For the few situations where there are dynamic changes on my boxes (e.g. usb sticks, radio killswitch and so on) I've made do with hotplug until now, but that set of shell scripts has simply grown too annoying to maintain. But recently I found out about mdev, a small component of busybox, and I took to it instantly.

Mdev was designed to be a micro-udev for all kinds of embedded systems where busybox is playing the vital role of providing most (if not all) classic unix tools. To me mdev is the embodiment of the unix mindset: do one thing, and do it well.

And that's what it does: if given the -s switch, it trawls /sys for things that look like devices and creates them in /dev. When run without args as hotplug helper, it creates the device the kernel tells it about, or loads firmware if that's asked for, or removes a device if the kernel says it is going away. These operations are adjustable via a straightforward, simple configuration file which also lets you tell it to run commands of your choice (and load modules), and that's all there is to it. mdev consists of about 650 lines of C, and it works very well.

What it is/was lacking, is support for kernel uevents with action=change, which some subsystems use (e.g. the rfkill subsystem signals changes to any radio kill switches that way). So I wrote this tiny patch to add that capability (I hope upstream includes it in the next version of busybox), and mdev now runs *-tagged commands on add, remove and change.

The other lacking thing is documentation - in the debian packages, that is. mdev is decently explained in docs/mdev.txt and examples/mdev*.conf in the source tarball, but the debian maintainer chose not to ship any of that. I'd recommend getting and reading those documents first if you ponder playing with mdev.

So, to help others along a bit, here is my own setup as an example:

• my commented mdev config file,
• my auto mounter for removable devices,
• and a small renaming helper that puts usb devices into a hierarchy in /dev/bus/usb/NNN/MMM.

I do have a few extra bits and pieces (e.g. startup scripts, small rfkill and bluetooth agents), but they're somewhat idiosyncratic and likely not very useful to others (but just ask if you do want them).

Socialism:

You have 2 cows. You give one to your neighbour.

Communism:

You have 2 cows. The state takes both and gives you some milk.

Fascism:

You have 2 cows. The state takes both and sells you some milk.

Nazism:

You have 2 cows. The state takes both and shoots you.

Bureaucratism:

You have 2 cows. The state takes both, shoots one, milks the other and then throws the milk away.

Traditional Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiples and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

American Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

Enron Venture Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You sell 3 of them to your publicly listed company using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public then buys your bull.

Accenture Model Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You shred them.

French Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You go on strike, organise a riot and block the roads because you want 3 cows.

Japanese Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You redesign them so they are 1/10 the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called "Cowkimon" and market it worldwide.

German Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month and milk themselves.

Italian Capitalism:

You have 2 cows, but you don't know where they are. You decide to have lunch.

Russian Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You count them and learn that you have 5 cows. You count again and learn you have 42 cows. You count again and learn you have 2 cows. You open another bottle of vodka.

Swiss Capitalism:

You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you. You charge the owners for storing them.

Chinese Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim that you have a full employment and and high bovine productivity. You arrest the journalist who reports otherwise.

Indian Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You worship them.

British Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. Both are mad.

Iraqi Capitalism:

Everyone thinks you have many cows. You tell them you have none but they don't believe you and bomb the shit out of your farm. You still have no cows, but at least you are part of a democracy.

New Zealand Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. The one on the left is looking pretty sexy...

Australian Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. Business seems good. You close the office and go for a few celebratory beers.